Woody Allen breaks a cardinal rule of film-making by strongly reminding the audience of a much better film. He double downs on the transgression by reminding them of arguably his best film "Annie Hall". Allen troubled blended family lives in the direct shadow of Coney Island's clanking Wonder Wheel Ferris wheel much like Alvy Singer's family lived under the Coney Island's Thunderbolt roller coaster. Hey, Coney Island is freaking crowded so you nab habitat where you can. Singer's family mind the placement for comedy while Humpty's family mines the proximity to a giant children's toy for angst, angst, and, yet even more angst. Understood being 82 years old at the time of the film's release doesn't lend itself to the wacky hi jinks of "Bananas" but this thing is more ponderous than "Interiors". It also feels even more derivative of other artists' style than "Interiors" was of Ingmar Bergman. Allen makes the decision to shoot large swaths of the film as one would shoot a Tennessee Williams play particularly whenever Jim Belushi is delivering one of several, tiresome monologues. It genuinely seems as if Allen recognized the casting of the stock middle-brow TV sitcom dad was a controversial choice and was determined to demonstrate he could act. Belushi can and the feat is all the greater given his Humpty has little to say behind reminding us he is a brutish but lovable alcoholic fisher with strained familial bonds. The distracting attractive Timberlake can act as well but largely that assessment comes from other, more comedic roles - here he bangs out the pseudo intellectual lines Allen's doppelganger characters (Owen Wilson in "Midnight in Paris", Louis C.K. in "Blue Jasmine", etc.) that have come to be legion. In short, less a film and more of a filmed rehearsal of a script in development.
Review of Wonder Wheel
